Since Ben’s on vacation (you may have noticed the crickets chirping in his absence), I’ve been in charge of pruning the comment- and trackback-spam that if:book and the rest of our website generates. Hopefully, you haven’t noticed much of this around here, but it arrives in ever-increasing volume: lately, we’ve been getting upwards of twenty comment-spams per day. They’ve become increasingly less coherent: while once they attempted to cajole our visitors to try out dubious sexual aids or patronize online casinos, the latest batch have been streams of random letters linking to websites that don’t seem to exist.

To combat the problem (which I imagine is much the same at any blog), we’ve installed a Movable Type plugin that filters comments and trackbacks. It does a pretty good job: like a spam filter in a mail program, it can guess what spam is, and it learns quickly. One curious piece of its method, however, might have wider repercussions for how we read & use blogs: it automatically suspects comments made on older posts to be comment spam. This is, by and large, correct: there aren’t a lot of people finding our old posts and leaving comments on them. But this does feel like we’re increasingly killing off old discussions. This ties into my musings from two weeks back, when I wondered how well blogs function as an archive.

A discussion at Slashdot zooms out to look at the ever decreasing signal-to-noise ratio from the soi-disantblogosphere as a whole. Spam blogs – often created to drive up Google rankings, for example – are becoming ever more common; just as it’s simple for you to create a blog, it’s simple for a robot to create a thousand. At what point does the sheer volume of spam start turning users away?

A decent guess, if the history of forms on the web is any indicator, is that something new will arise. Mentioned in the Slashdot discussion is Usenet, the newsgroup-based discussion system. Spam first reared its ugly head on Usenet, and by the late 1990s had almost consumed it. As the level of spam rose, users departed – some, undoubtedly, to the comparatively safer environs of the blogosphere. What comes after blogs?

While on the history of blogs: Matt Sharkey has an interesting history of suck.com (here helpfully archived by its creator, Carl Steadman)

. Suck wasn’t a blog as we know them (readers could email the author, but not directly leave comments for others to see), but it did premiere (in 1995) what would become a key concept of the blog, having fresh concept daily. It also brought snarky semi-anonymous commentators to the Web, and the idea of using hyperlinks for humor. They did get in five solid years, though, and the site is arguably an important milestone in the history of how we read online. Browsing through Steadman’s archive provides food for thought about archives on the web: while it’s still entertaining, you quickly notice that almost every one of the links is broken. Nothing lasts forever.